I'm working on some feature comparison's for clients and this morning I slurped down a few dozen personal ads from the top ten dating sites.
Initially I was looking for ways to increase the value of ads by giving members the ability to add metatdata to each other's profiles but the exercise reaffirmed my general impression that all dating sites share 99.5% of their DNA.
I hear about sites adding tons of features all the time. Sites with no money, no marketing plan and no clear path to profitability. Go ahead, add Skype and a blog, you're treading water already, these features aren't going to bring you to dry land unless you have an integration plan that makes sense.
The only difference that matters is the members. 90% of the dating sites out there have databases full crap and they do nothing to fix this, thinking more is better. Wrong.
Dating sites clearly have a long way to go when it comes to promoting the demographic differences of their sites and the dating site reviews aren't doing much to help the situation. What's the difference between Yahoo and Match members? Zero.
Are eHarmony members really more “serious” than on Match? Go ask 5 members from each service. I did. No difference.
Niche sites have it a lot easier, that's for sure.
I bet I could take eHarmony's marketing budget and make any other dating site in the top 20 just as much money. It's not the questions, it's the advertising. And I'm not talking about Mate1 and True on Myspace, that's short lived revenue.
This is why Yahoo is losing ground so quickly. Their marketing seems to be mostly internal to the Yahoo network, which is enormous, but their brand footprint around the net is tiny. They may spend a lot on banner ads but I don't see them.
Social networks don't have to advertise, the media does it for them. A nice place to be.
A quick gut check of the demographics of the major social networks shows they're all pretty much the same, the only major differentiator is age, some cater to teens, others twentysomethings and a few think they are going to make it based on the needs of us thirtysomethings.
The big money is in the mass market for dating and social networking. There are a few niche sites doing well, clearly the exception to the rule and I hope they keep growing. My problem is that I'm not really a niche guy unless you count ENFP,Mac,snowboarding,consultant as a niche. I haven't see that site yet.
The biggest underserved niche is clearly geography. Some sites get it right, others not so much. I live in New England, that's generally considered three states. Why can I only sign up for one state at a time on most sites or have a radius of 200 miles? I don't want to drive to CT and I probably wouldn't date someone from NH, but MA, VT and ME are fine. So let me define my home base and area according to my needs. Typing in a zip code is so crude.
Looking for some final post-coffee inspiration for comparing social nets and dating, I revisited the new Facebook privacy features and Bebo's new personalize home page. Look at the incredible amount of personalization and customization these sites offer. I went back to the dating site profiles and immediately felt sad. Look at these poor static pages. Nobody to link to, no private information to share with people after a few dates, same generic color schemes.
I don't need my profile to look like a Myspace acid trip, but surely you can give me a few color scheme options, additional layout options and maybe a video player. Anything to differentiate myself from the other dudes in my zip code. Please?
This article is the first in an ongoing comparison between social networking and dating sites.
Look out, recommendation engines are hot again. In 1996 it was all about Firefly, then Amazon, followed by Netflix and now a whole new crop of players are emerging, from Attention Trust to Pandora, who's leader I saw speak at MIT a few weeks ago. Great story how they got from the Music Genome Project to Pandora.
In the dating space, we have eHarmony on one end of the spectrum (it's the algorithm, baby), to Engage (people matching people) on the other.
There is plenty of room in the middle for various recommendation systems based on favorite brands, bands and clothing. I always have friends list brands in their personal ads. As the driver of a heavily-modified Passat (watch out BMW 325 drivers!), I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to date an Escalade driver but I would buy a Prius driver a coffee to see if we are a good fit.
PayPal co-founder Max Levchin “is using what he learned at PayPal, not to root out fraud but to create the best recommender system he can imagine, one that will cover the entire Web, pulling content of all kinds - music, movies, gadgets, blogs, news stories, cars, one-night stands, you name it - filtering it according to individual preference and delivering it to the desktop.”
If Slide is at all familiar, it's as a knockoff of Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users upload photos, which are displayed on a running ticker or Slide Show, and subscribe to one another's feeds. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships, Levchin explains.
The site is beginning to introduce new content into Slide Shows. It culls news feeds from around the Web and gathers real-time information from, say, eBay auctions or Match.com profiles. It drops all of this information onto user desktops and then watches to see how they react.
Pulling Match profile photos? That's going to go over well in Texas. Word is that Riya is talking to various dating sites as well. Will Slide be the first to launch photo-based matching and ask permission from dating sites later?
The idea of watching a scrolling list of products and identifying what I find appealing is somewhat nauseating. Surfing a photostream which is continually refined based on the hive mind and my preferences is much more appealing. I didn't see any Match.com import feature on Slide, perhaps this is to come in the future. For now, we'll have to keep tweaking search parameters on dating sites to find each other.
Last night I was tweaking my Match profile. I saw that it asked me for the town I grew up in. I don't remember that as a question before, and have no way of telling if that's a new question or not because who can keep track of these things?
Sometimes it takes re-subscribing to a dating site to make you realize most dating site users are like goldfish in a bowl. One trip around equals the industry standard three month average subscriber. After that point, they're gone, to be replaced by the next member. In fact, I just read a business plan for a new social networking site that listed reducing customer churn as the primary marketing tactic.
This is a good thing for the industry, which has a collective memory of goldfish, unlike the elephant-like memory of most consumer services. Think Enron, Exxon, Sony, etc. In the dating world your missteps are forgotten quickly, which is a clear upside to the amount of customer churn the industry generates each month.
How many upgrades, changes and revisions have the major dating sites made to their sites in the last year? What are the effects of these changes? Who are the self-described stats geeks that gets off on metrics and measuring the changes brought about by small changes in the user experience? I love the idea of playing with all the levers and seeing the results. Doing this at a high-traffic site would be fascinating. Change a font size, loose 1,00 customers. Drop subscription price by $1, make an additional $500k in revenue that week. Success can often be traced back to a color scheme, a font size or how search results are displayed.
Some sites are quite aggressive in their willingness to tweak the norm, try something new, or test a feature. Others require a panel of experts and a lengthy series of meetings to make the most minute changes. The important thing is to remember that we never really know what's going to work and what won't until we try it. In your next product development meeting, take the conversation about more radical changes a step further, hopefully you'll be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.
GottaFlirt is an interactive, fast-paced dating game. A woman plays with several men by asking questions and rating their answers. Create questions with a single click or personalize them if you wish. Too shy to play? No problem! Watch others play, help rate their answers, or chat with new friends.
After talking with the Bunchball team last week, I decided to sign up and check out the site. It also helped that I saw Gottaflirt was an advertiser on zefrank. Great place to get some visibility while it's getting huge traffic for a videoblog, but not too huge that they have ad salespeople.
A new trend in these types of sites is giving the power to women, where they invite men to participate. Some people may call this empowering, others argue that it alienates 1/2 of the potential audience. What I learned is that is depends on the audience.
Getting started:
Women: Register, create game. Invite men. Play Game.
Men: Register, be one of the first 7 men to join the game as it starts. Your score is determined by the hostess' and the audience's real time rating of your answers. When the game ends, the winner and hostess exchange e-mails, while the runner-up only gets his e-mail sent to the hostess.
This actually sounds pretty cool. Quick signup process, and it supposedly inlines your Myspace friends to bring into games, nice touch.
Scheduling occurs on a page featuring a large matrix of times and icon-sized pix of the women hosting the game. I like the gallery view.
Bonus points to the designers for adding some halloween graphics to the site.
I like that they had a menu item called WTF, because that's what I was thinking while I was trying to figure out how the site works.
I created an account and answered a few questions.
If you wait 30 seconds you can play for free, it costs a $1 to get priority.. I'm waiting to be selected for a game. 48 seconds to go, I hope I get picked because I'm starving and need food.
I'm in!
Waiting 20 seconds...
The advertising module is rotating branded panties and a Chemistry.com affiliate ad.
We're playing.
Answering questions. The questions are written for a 20 year old gangstas, really, really terribly done. Glad we can provide our own custom answers. I wonder if women can create their own questions?
Players can also provide their own custom (often raunchy) answers, and the rating slider is a nice touch. Not sure what the slider does. Uh-oh. Every answer from my co-players references body parts or insults the woman hosting the quiz. Now they are calling me names I will not repeat here. I see that the woman host may actually be a demo! I can't tell, some sort of weird purgatory situation. What's happening?
Game over, I think I got second place from the demo engine. Kind of embarassing. Someone insults my mother so I log off.
There is some sort of chat bot that reacts to curse words and the mention of other programs, but in game I'm not sure if the women can kick or ban players.
Gottaflirt is a tremendous idea marred by a bad user experience. by that I mean if I was female I wouldn't touch this site for anything. The guys on there were brutal. A game is only as good as it's players, or something like that. Any dating site that may want to partner with Gottaflirt is going to have to be guaranteed that the language and harassing can be managed effectively. right now it's a nightmare.
I had high hopes for this site. It needs better questions, better user management, prizes and so on. But I still like it, a lot, great potential here. I will be speaking with the creators soon and will post our conversation.
Matchdoctor has introduced blogs to the standard dating website.
Luke Kalish, President of Matchdoctor:
Turning to blogs was only a natural progression in the online dating industry. Blogs are an ideal way of getting to know someone through their own words and expressions. A blog is an on-line diary or a frequently updated personal web page. On Matchdoctor, you can use blogs as your own personal space on the site to share with other members how you are feeling and what you are thinking about anything - from personal issues to site feedback to public opinions. Other members can place comments on blogs and can lead to some interesting discussions.
This is great to hear. Blogs give members more freeform ways to express themselves without being forced into the usual About Me/About You essay format.
A rating system, called Kudos, let's users give or remove Kudos to other members' blogs as a way of showing interest or approval. An excellent way leverage the power of blogs, add an additional layer of interactivity and hopefully works toward getting people stay involved with their blog and not abandon them.
Several dating sites are now featuring blogs, Fastcupid is a good example.
Last week I spoke with Rajat Paharia, CEO and founder of Social gaming company Bunchball, and board member Gene Mauro. Gene is a long time video game exec., started and operated several high profile game ventures including Capital Entertainment Group (with the founders of the Xbox) and Myelin Media (with billionaire Carl Icahn).
Bunchball has announced it has raised $2 million in first round funding. The Bay Area-based company raised the funds from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures, having previously received an angel round. The company aims to share revenue with the host sites, and also plans to launch a women’s TV network.
The company previously riased a small angel round. CEO Rajat Paharia is the former co-director of the Software Experiences Practice at IDEO- via PaidContent.
Gene and Rajat walked me through several integrations, some more impressive than others. At first I was hung up on the fact that the games looked a little Windows 3.1 for my liking. But the pair quickly showed me that they have much bigger plans than simple Flash gaming widgets for blogs and social networks.
Yes Virginia, collaborative games are coming to online dating, finally. It may not be like sitting across from each other at a candle-lit table, but it's a huge improvement over browsing static profiles.
I won't say much more at the moment except that gaming and collaborative 20-question style features would be a welcome addition to social networks and dating sites.
Pete at Mashable complains that only 200 people have installed the Bunchball widget on Myspace. Pete is missing the point. Bunchball is not a pure Myspace play and there is a lot more to the company's business model than just a presence on Myspace and other social networks. That's what happens when you just look at stats but Pete is a busy guy and often skimps on the depth of focus he can put into site reviews, which I am prone to do when there is such a torrent of information fighting for my attention.
Clear value propositions, focused, experienced management teams and easy-to-grok revenue models get me all hot under the collar. The question is, will widgetizing their games on social networks bunchballdrive enough advertising revenue to make the company viable or will partnerships and more difficult dating site integrations be the real cash cow?
Northwestern University has developed an automated news-video program, News At Seven, with help from the National Science Foundation.
News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.
Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.
This is absolutely amazing. It's even cooler when you realize all that's going on behind the scenes to pull everything together. Watch the Celebrity news clip, it's pulling web news and blog commentary together, seamlessly.
This is a first attempt, for this group anyway, at automated newscasting, and it's only going to get better.
Imagine if dating sites went past canned photos of "sexy new singles", instead posting short, customized videoblogs every day which culled together information from across the system to present members with avatar-based video of notable new people worth checking out (and why you should pay attention to them based on how you match up.)
Avatars are cool. Avatars that reach into databases, find out what's new and notable and personalize the news via automated delivery are mind-blowing.
Frequent commenter James Houran, Ph.D. points us to an article he did in Joe Tracy's Online Dating Magazine in response to my statement about dating sites being searchable static billboards.
James says that people can have relationships online. I would argue there is not enough emotive bandwidth and functionality built into today's online communication tools to effectively support the initial stages of relationships, online or off. Today's online communication is the equivalent of grunting, what we need is the ability to hit the high notes and low and everything in between.
Online chat can as much a nightmare for women as being approached in a bar bar. Actually, most women would agree that online chat is worse due to the fact that men tend to overdo it when they realize there is a live woman on the other end. And if there is video involved? Cover your eyes when you first connect.
For some people, reading Happen Magazine or dating tips at Yahoo is enough. Others need the dating site itself to help shepherd them through the initial "reach out and touch someone" phase. Speaking of Yahoo, did you see that Personals Premiere is now only $20.83 a month? That doesn't seem very premiere.
A brief survey of the introduction part of the dating process leaves all dating sites wanting. Dating sites are good at showing you all the people with blonde hair and no kids within 25 miles. Where they falter, and where the most improvement can occur, is helping daters through the introductory process. This is a clearly identified problem that nobody wants to tackle. Simply adding video and chat is not the only answer.
What I'm talking about is progressive communication where two people are put through less of a free-for-all conversation and instead guided through the introduction process by the next generation of introduction engines. These engines will feature directed engagement through a series of collaborative, participatory introductions, including group dates, games, trivia and Q&A.
I hope that by introducing the term, the dating industry will start thinking of ways to build services which work along side online daters, helping them make better choices, alerting them to potential problems and making the whole online dating experience that much more enjoyable.
Social networking sites are not off the hook. They suffer similarly when the amount of social interaction is measured. There is absolutely nothing social about Myspace if you ignore the chat feature. Social networking is basically advertising-supported voyeurism which needs to adapt to the changing needs of their communities. Friendster, anyone?
I teleported to the brand-new Starwood Hotel in SecondLife this morning. As soon as I sat at the bar a few people came by and we started talking. One guy (no bartender!) started handing out virtual beers and we talked and drank for a while. I tried to get my avatar to do a backflip and he fell and hit his head. I think it was the beer and my lame SL scripting skills. When this place gets more popular, it's going to be quite the online pickup spot. Hint to dating sites, you should be thinking about a presence in SL. Much more about this later.
Mark Brooks interviewed Evan Katz, founder of e-Cyrano. Worth reading, as Evan is one of the most visible value-added service providers in the dating space.
The majority of online daters write unappealing, ineffective, generic profiles. Helping people write better profiles increases the chances they will meet someone, and overall, increases a dating site's value.
As someone who has built and run ProfileDoctor, I pitched profile improvement to dating sites until I was blue in the face. At one point I had 50 dating site partners, and none of them ever converted very well. It was easier and less work to advertise on Google, which was counter-intuitive at first.
I'm certain at this point that profile improvement needs to be built directly into the profile creation process. The minute people need to go into the Help section or to a third-party site, you've basically lost them. Dating sites are going to have to start offering automated profile help as part of the usual monthly subscription price.
WhiteSmoke has a basic application that supposedly writes dating profiles. That really should be a web service, not a downloadable piece of software.
For those looking for high-touch services, it will be interesting to see how many sites e-Cyrano can persuade to become partners of his new private label services.
Private labeling is a pain, integrating web services with a simple API can be a better solution, depending on the level of integration.
Not many dating sites understand the value of great profiles. Hopefully this will change over time. What is your dating site doing to make sure people are representing themselves well?
Virtual world builders Rivers Run Red have built the Swedish social network PlayAhead inside SecondLife. I've been spending more time in SL and it appears that the 3D internet is slowing coming to fruition. c|net's Michael Parsons has a review.
There's a new dating site in town, Aloone.com. Actually it's not in town, it's in Switzerland. Why would I mention a Swiss dating site? Because it features a novel visualization technique unlike any other I've seen.
The application was developed by a team based in California over a nine month period. French, Japanese and Chinese versions are in the works. Besides the visualization tool, I don't see much to differentiate Aloone from other dating sites. They do however have have a catchy euro/electronic theme song and some funky Flash animations.
A while back I created a graph of the dating industry. I use a version of it as a consulting tool, live version is stale, definitely needs a lot of work. visualization tools, when done right, are incredibly helpful when it comes to visualizing lot's of people or companies or things on the screen at once and see the relationship between each item.
Yesterday I had coffee with Jeana Frost, creator of Virtual Dates, an application well suited for the icebreaker portion of meeting someone online. You know the feeling. Someone catches your eye, but their profile doesn't leave you with much to start a conversation with. You sit there re-reading the profile over and over, trying to glean that tidbit of information that's going to tip the scale over and have you reaching for the Wink or Email button.
Suffice to say it was clear early on in our conversation that we shared common ground when it comes to our views on the shortcomings of online dating.
Jeana and her fellow academics think the current model for meeting someone online is artificial and static, and far removed from everyday social interaction. I couldn't agree more.
According to Jeana and co's research, online dating is terribly inefficient, lacks appropriate filters and a mechanism for social feedback. Where is the information we really want to know about a person? The attributes we need most that aren't described by income, religion or favorite sports team?
To begin to address the perceived shortcomings of today's dating sites, Jeana built Virtual Dates while at the MIT Media Lab. Virtual Dates is built on Chat Circles, part of of Sociable Media Group.
Chat Circles is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous text conversation. Here, color and form are used to convey social presence and activity, and proximity-based filtering is used intuitively to break large groups into conversational clusters. The system also includes an integrated history interface, which visualizes archival Chat Circle logs. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions.
While I haven't seen the demo, from the description, it sounds like it could be a useful feature for dating and social networking sites, if the user experience is done just right and the final product is properly integrated. It's got to be dead simple to stick on a site like a Userplane chat and tightly integrated, like WeAttract on Yahoo Personals. Speaking of WeAtttract, whatever happened to them?
I'm often frustrated with my dating site clients when it comes to baseline metrics for measuring various site stats. Thankfully, being a Media Lab alumni, Jeana knows how important the role of data logging can be in monitoring and measuring the performance of an application like Virtual Dates.
Thankfully there is a phenomenal testing lab available, Myspace. Unleash your app out into the wild, get 50k users in a few weeks and log loads of data about how people are, and aren't using the service.
Less than half of all singles in the US has tried online dating. The other half remains a cagey quarry unlikely to sign up for a dating site any time soon due to a number of factors, known and unknown.
Dating sites should be doing everything in their power to figure out ways to entice more people to try online dating. Adding social networking features is part of the solution, but the real answer is the unknown and often intangible gut reaction people get to a particular blend of features, user experience and quality of the members. The vibe of a site is often what makes or breaks it's success and it's almost impossible to stumble across the perfect blend of paid subscription, social networking, dating, collaboration and communication tools which will define the online dating experience of the future.
Perhaps applications like Virtual Dates, or an environment based on the concept, is what's needed to entice the other 50 million singles to give online dating a shot.
Jeana's dissertation is titled "Decision Making in the Information Age: A Study of and Design for Online Dating." You can bet that's going to be on my reading shelf in the near future. Harvard Business School did a story on Virtual Dates last week.
Dating and social networking executives would do well to seek out Jeana at jeana.frost at gmail dot com to find out more about how new social interaction applications will drive the next generation of online dating and social networking. If enough interest is drummed up, I'm hoping we'll see Virtual Dates on dating sites soon enough.
Dating in SecondLife seems to be alive and well, although I'm not reading much about it. A few speed-dating events have occurred, and today I found Digiluv.
Digiluv is a sexy new service that allows you to create a character and meet other people in a tropical virtual world.
The service features groups, blogs, friends list, events and more. This really should exist 100% in second life, have external profiles and chat rooms makes no sense, that's what SecondLife is for, and it does it much better.
There are entire micro-communities in Second Life that support online 3D relationships, from stores selling sexy outfits and special body parts to customized physics modules you can share with that special someone, or something.
SecondLife dating and social networking is going to be huge. It will take a few more years to reach critical mass but it's going to happen.
Key differences between Myspace and Facebook. Myspace is busy adding areas to the site that assuage advertisers while Facebook adds features and functionality that makes it a better service for users. Liz at GigaOM says:
Sometimes Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of big-picture thinkers try too hard to separate themselves, calling a blogging tool “notes” or adding a company blog without a feed. But other times they seem to really get it — for instance, today’s new features: news feeds that show, chronologically, your friends’ most recent activities across the site, and your own most recent activities across the site. In 30 seconds, I can find out what my family, my college friends, my current friends, and even some of my work contacts have been doing. If I think my own “mini-feed” has too much information in it, I can adjust it item-by-item to leave no trace.
I was reading someone over the weekend saying they were enjoying tracking their friend's via SMS messages on Dodgeball. I've started doing that at heyletsgo. Then I read about a guy who thinks Google Calendar makes it too easy to rob people.
I've been digging the MIT Advertising Lab, a blog on the future of advertising technology. Here is a List of Brands on MySpace. Lot's of interesting stuff about brands in SecondLife and other advertising tidbits. Also, found, SpaceCadetz. The best of youguessedit. I was wondering when a guide like this would launch, with over 100 million people and myriad pockets of music, groups and random stuff that 99% of Myspacers don't know about.
At least once a week I upload a new photo to my personal ad, only to have it cropped to the point where you can count my nose hairs. Dating sites are forcing people to display photos without much context. I often wonder if a person is dancing, in bed or on the beach because the auto-crop feature has butchered the photo. Conversely, the person is so far away that it could be Andy Rooney back there.
Tommer Leyvand of Tel Aviv University in Israel has created a program which applies an algorithm that adjusts a photo's facial features to make people appear more attractive. The software was built on top of a previous project which measured the attractiveness of people's photos and measured the attributes of the "beauty function."
I would gladly pay a few extra bucks to look better in my photos, sign me up! Just think of the dismay when I show up, the crestfallen look in my date's eyes when they see the non-botox shooting, up-till-2am receding hairline that is me.
Tommer was gracious enough to perform digital surgery on a photo of me which I will post when received.
At least once a week I upload a new photo to my personal ad, only to have it cropped to the point where you can count my nose hairs. Dating sites are forcing people to display photos without much context. I often wonder if a person is dancing, in bed or on the beach because the auto-crop feature has butchered the photo. Conversely, the person is so far away that it could be Andy Rooney back there.
Tommer Leyvand of Tel Aviv University in Israel has created a program which applies an algorithm that adjusts a photo's facial features to make people appear more attractive. The software was built on top of a previous project which measured the attractiveness of people's photos and measured the attributes of the "beauty function."
I would gladly pay a few extra bucks to look better in my photos, sign me up! Just think of the dismay when I show up, the crestfallen look in my date's eyes when they see the non-botox shooting, up-till-2am receding hairline that is me.
Tommer was gracious enough to perform digital surgery on a photo of me which I will post when received.
Lawless Luvoo.com: Missouri residents on the Do Not Call list are receiving telemarketing calls from dating site Luvoo.com. Reader Renaldorv says I have been living under a rock, that Luvoo is not the real deal. I put Luvoo and Mate1 in the same category. Site that will be around for a while, but how good are they when it comes to getting yourself off the dating market? Fads people, fads.
Measuring Dating Site Success By Active Users: Markus says that of the top 50 dating sites there are only three free sites? This bears looking into, difficult to believe. Let's talk metrics. How about the number of active users logged into the website, averaged month-to-month. Now if we can get other large-scale sites to measure the same way we may have something along the lines of apples-to-apples comparison. For niche sites this won't work. How to measure their success?
Look at JD Power and Associates. Sterling brand, highly respected, solid results. Why can't we get this level of accuracy and truth when it comes to measuring website attributes?
Bill Tancer (blog) @ Hitwise, stats gurus at Comscore and Alexa. Go take a vacation together for two weeks somewhere with limited cell service and lots of umbrella drinks and figure out a decent measurement algorithm.
I"m beginning to like what I see from some Keynote more and more, although even they have troubles with rankings (LoveHappens as the "darling of the online dating industry?). Clearly no one system is enough. To that end, I propose a mashup of Hitwise for real-time data, Keynote for customer satisfaction rankings, Comscore for deeper five-figure research papers, and either Google Toolbar or some other equivalent for user tracking.
Social software coverage at the Social Software Blog has moved to the Download Squad. Looks like that's the end of that.
Mark Brooks is starting a site for internet dating affiliates. While I question the need for yet another site dedicated to educating affiliates, my hat goes off to anyone who can raise the clue density amongst affiliate managers and the countless lazyweb people who throw up affiliate-driven dating site review. Almost every one I've ever seen has been awful. Weak category structure (don't put eHarmony in every category for crying out loud), bad UI and cheesy Adwords.
Dating site affiliate marketing is in a sad state of affairs on both ends. How about raising the bar with well-designed websites, helpful content and edutainment for consumers? One last thing, if you are an affiliate with a few dating sites, don't just list the ones that make you money. That's not a directory it's a waste of people's time.
True is touting the fact that Hitwise calls them the #1 dating site. Nice marketing exercise if it were remotely True.
Webdate Desktop Application: Actually, it's an Agent. Message, Instant Message, & Search other singles in your area. I'm glad it "Sits snugly in your windows taskbar." Download.
Hottest Dating Sites Based on Religion, Ethnicity: MarketingVox says some niche dating like JDate, Shaadi.com or Naseeb.com are thriving.
I was featured in a English as Second Language DVD last year, just put the clip up on Youtube. I will probably regret posting this link but I've been quiet all week and you need something to laugh at. Talk about a bad hair day.
Much of my work in the online dating industry involves working with startups looking for a way to leapfrog their way into a market-leading position in a particular niche. Other times it's developing new growth strategies for established sites that are looking to crack the top 10, or struggling to stay there.
I've spoken with many startups consisting of a single person with an idea and the drive and ambition to see their vision realized. The one thing almost every one of these people lack is funding. It's near impossible to raise VC for a startup dating site these days, the risk factor is off the charts. This leaves most people to hatch their idea and work on the site when they come home from work and on weekends. A select few are able raise angel financing from friends and family to work full time on their labor of love.
A typical call from a dating site startup goes something like this:
I paid a developer a lot of money for a site and the developer has become unresponsive to my ongoing needs. I'm not sure how much to spend on marketing, or where to spend it. I don't have a strategic plan for moving forward, and I feel overwhelmed thinking of everything I have to accomplish in order to launch, let alone achieve profitability.
They can't launch with a 1/2-finished site, or worse, launch with a broken site that doesn't meet the minimum requirements of today's online daters. They have a To Do list as long as their arm and not enough time in the day to get things done. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Or, as is often the case, the caller has a live site not getting the traction they expected after three, six or even nine months. The person has usually burned through what they consider a significant amount of capital and earned a lot of grey hairs for their efforts. This is especially frustrating, they have earned their startup battle scars and need a fresh strategy for getting out of the red.
Most people can't afford a typical five-figure consulting engagement, and all dating site startups need similar help. To this end I am putting together a new consulting product to address the needs of startup dating sites.
Typical startups have a different problem set than established players. The new consulting arrangement will cover issues common to all dating site startups. Generally things will start out broad in scope, further refinement of the focus of the engagement occurs naturally as familiarity and understanding grows between us.
The new practice will be structured to reflect the where the company is in it's life-cycle; startup, crossing the chasm, mainstream adoption to exit strategies. I suspect most interest will be in the startup mode, although I have been speaking with several sites who are mid-tier and need a push to progress to the next level.
To manage time and costs, I'm testing the new Ether pay-per-call service. It's easy to schedule a call where we can address a predefined list of questions. You provide the initial list and I will suggest additional topics prior to the call. From this list, during the call we will begin to develop a plan of action tailored for your specific circumstances. You get the benefit my years of experience in a condensed a la carte format where you can purchase as much time and expertise as you need.
The first phone call is an hour long minimum and will be used to establish a baseline status of your company, site, resources available, expectations and goals. Additional hours can be easily added. More often than not, the initial discussion and questions bring about more of the same as we zero in on your specific needs.
If you are seeking insights into how to accomplish any of the following goals for your dating site or social networking service, this new offering may be right for you.
Drive more traffic to your site
Increase conversion rates
Free or paid subscription
Service differentiators
Marketing strategy
New features (VOIP, chat, mobile, games, anonymous calling)
Comprehensive site evaluations
Other specific issues you define
All calls are confidential and you will receive an brief summary outlining key points of discussion.
Call Me to schedule time on the phone, affordable advice immediately. Get the information you need, when you need it. No long term consulting arrangements, contracts or hassle.
TechCrunch is talking about online dating again, someone over there must be single. This was the title of a New York Times Magazine article two years ago, aren't we at 3.0 by now?
Story starts out with the usual "Myspace is really a dating site", traffic stats and PlentyOfFish references.
It's a decent aggregation of a particular cross-section of dating sites from someone with a particular perspective. These are sites in the news at the moment, not necessarily sites that are pushing the boundaries of online dating.
Overall, it's still business as usual. We'll see more contraction between the majors and there will always be niche sites popping up. A lot of sites will continue on due to the low monthly costs to stay in operation and a few will sell their databases and move on.
The bottom line is that every one of these sites lives and dies by their traffic numbers. If you can't buy the traffic, you're doomed. I don't care what matching, tagging or rating feature you add to your site.
I keep hearing of amazing new sites coming out. Spend a few minutes on each of these sites and you'll see they are more about incremental change than the evolution of online dating. Except for VerbDate, they are all introduction services, not dating sites.
Most people go to HotorNot for the vicarious thrill of rating people and seeing how they stack up. As for the whole rating each other thing, it's fun for a while and I'm happy for you if some guy rated you a 10 and you ended up getting married. I doubt many people will join a particular dating service just to be able to rate members.
I would argue that the majority of these sites are not targeting serious daters. That's fine, but a site like Wikia Personals, which is like Geocities 8 years ago, doesn't really belong on this list just because it's a wiki page.
Interesting that most sites are created by techies, geeks and biz dev people with little experience in the fields of sociology and psychology. These are pure-play internet companies looking to build traffic and sell out to the highest bidder, few can charge subscriptions and the ad-supported model doesn't have the legs to continue on as a mom-and-pop company.
Quick run down of a few of the sites:
Engage (at one time a client) has $5 million in the bank and is poised to move to the next level.
Google Personals: This is never going to take off. Ever. Let's move on.
GreatBoyFriends: ambivalent about this site. It's there and it's making some money for now.
MatchActivity: Latest in a long line of activity-based sites. Most people want dinner and sex, for the rest, here is where you find your climbing/games/movie/protest event partner. Tracking other people's activity on the site and bringing about more transparency is useful.
MatchTag: See MatchActivity.
MingleNow: Ad agency runs social networking site. They are RSSifying everything, run by a club promoter. Will feature a list of "nearly every social place."
PlentyOfFish: What else is there to say about this site that hasn't already been said by Markus?
PodDater: I predict that people will start uploading dating videos on Myspace and YouTube, at which point PodDater needs licensed content from major studios to stay relevant.
I ran out of time to write blurbs about the rest of the sites. The comments section has retorts from left out sites and responses from people at Yahoo and other large dating sites, definitely worth a visit.
Safe dating site TrueDater has launched a site for bookmarking people across multiple social networks. I've been critical of TrueDater in the past. I'm not convinced the service has the audience or features to be considered useful. I think something along the lines of member whitelists are where the industry needs to be heading.
Freckl.com is the first ever “social bookmarking” site for people! Just like you can save links to your “Favorite” web sites in your web browser, on freckL.com you can save links to profiles of people on your favorite dating or social networking sites. Even better, you can share your favorites with others! Also, you can “tag” your favorites with keywords and use these keywords to find new people to meet.
Social bookmarking has been done before in the dating space, but there was never any long-term value to the service, whereas aggregating Favorites across several social networking sites is a smart step in a new longer-term direction for TrueDater.
The home page is split into the "hottest" males and females. Clicking a link brings up a page for each person, with tags, some metadata and their entire profile in a window. In this context, in-lining entire Myspace pages is wrong, plain and simple. I predict Myspace and Yahoo will shut them down or make them remove the functionality in short order.
I can see pulling the person's photo, but what is the value of displaying the entire page?
Profile data as part of an RSS feed- we've talked about this many times before, and this is a perfect example of a third-party site that could drive traffic to dating sites.
Myspace has made voyeurism and profile hopping simple. Does Freckl think they can do it better?
One you bookmark someone, you have to enter in the screen name gender orientation age and tags. Everything but the user-created tags can be pulled directly from the profile. Why make people type in the information? Lazy, they could have avoided the wrath of Myspace if they had taken a few more days to tweak the code.
Voting for the profile is limited to hot, scam or cheesy. Most Myspace profiles are cheesy or scams, not much value to this rating system. There are thumbs up or down buttons as well.
The real value of Freckl is what you can do with each person's meta-list of people. Advertisers and live events and group buying comes to mind initially. Anything is better than useless, unfocused Google Ads.
In it's current form, the site is really a directory for soft porn, Hot-or-Not meets social networking. There is no focus on the value to people otherwise. This may change over time, but until they make it worth the while, it's easier and more fun browse sites directly.
Edward at Other Singles has been using Google Trends to track the popularity of the term "dating" according to geography.
Check out the graph. It shows Google search terms related to dating from regions of the world. Searches related to "dating" on Google eclipse all of the other countries combined. Granted Google Trends is still in Beta, even if the results are off by 50% there are still a lot of Nigerian "daters" looking for "dates". I have to wonder how many dating sites are using AdWords and not filtering out where their AdWords display (exclude Nigeria for example).
Edward outs scammers from OtherSingles.com on his blog. I would like to hear more dating sites talk about the idea of a shared whitelist or blacklist, which are popular in today's email systems.
As I've said many times, rate-a-date sites are as good as the data they publish and the number of people using any one site. I believe something along the lines of a shared blacklist would improve the quality of participating dating sites and be good for online dating industry as a whole.
The solution could be as straightforward as XML formatted messages containing information about blacklisted members. Of course there is a lot more that needs to be figured out, that's where background checks and other identification systems come into play. At Identity Mashup a few weeks ago there were people talking about this kind of solution, only they weren't talking about online dating.
This idea needs more perspective from inside the dating industry. How many sites would be open to discussing sharing this type of data between competitors? Does the potential for increased revenue from a clean member database outweigh the cost of putting such a system in place? How about the effect on the industry overall? Or do you think customer service reps will continue to be able to stay on top of scammers and spammers and consumers won't care one way or the other? I say let the machines do it.
From the department of location-based presence detection, Meetro has released an new version of their chat client. Meetro let's you see who is nearby, based on zip code, and includes a basic profile. They have a Myspace importer that pulls in your About, Music Movies, Places and other profile data. Nice.
Something they need to fix is being clear about the import process. I wasn't able to import my Myspace data into my existing Meetro profile. I just used Meetro to talk to the founder Paul Bragiel and he says they are overhauling the whole profile creation and import process.
This is classic Web 2.0 behavior. Web 2.0 is in a large part about taking back ownership of your data after seeing it disappear behind the walled gardens of the previous generation of internet companies who's business model was based on taking your information and doing with it whatever they pleased, including selling it up the river to the highest bidder.
I used to slurp down Match and Yahoo profiles into the ProfileDoctor system for easier editing, and have always approved of letting other services grab your information. It's called sharing, and as more companies figure out ways to become profitable with bi-directional data sharing through common, public API's, everyone will benefit.
What a weekend, hope everyone enjoyed theirs as much as I did. First, some bittersweet business news. After 3 years, I've closed down ProfileDoctor. I've burned the entire business onto a DVD and will take some time to ponder what to do with it while I work with current consulting clients and get started on several new initiatives.
Profile writing is definitely a niche business, I never had any set expectations about the outcome, at the time when I started it in 1993, it seemed like an interesting niche opportunity in an exploding market. My idea was to systematize the entire profile writing and revision process, which we began to do until we realized there needed to be a substantial human component in order to warrant charging a reasonable amount of money.
From what I know, nobody in the biz has been able to make a full-time go it of as of yet. Today I received a press release from an Israeli company called White Smoke.
White Smoke has launched a special online ‘date profiling’ program to help single people promote themselves in a more articulate and powerful manner. The program, which can be downloaded from www.whitesmoke.com and appears as an icon at the bottom of the computer screen, helps people using internet dating programs to express themselves more eloquently and to support them with spelling, grammar and text enrichment suggestions.
This is precisely what I had been talking about doing with dating sites but never raised the funds to develop the programs to their fullest extent. Maybe they have the technology, marketing budget and contacts necessary to penetrate the dating industry. White Smoke obviously started out in the commercial and medical space and is now branching out into online dating to see if they can get any traction in the market.
White Smoke employs typical FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) marketing:
"If you have spelling or grammar mistakes you can forget about finding a high-quality date. We will provide you with a sample dating profile and you can add your own information and changes and use it online. Our templates will teach you how to write an online dating profile, and our dating dictionary contains important words to insert into a dating profile."
Back when I was naive about online daters, I would have eaten this up. Now that the bloom is off the rose and people are savvy about online dating, I'm not so sure. I have performed exhaustive tests of headlines, grammar, photos and many other ways to try to game dating site search engines and improve results, kind of like SEO for dating profiles. I have a few ideas about what works and what doesn't, it will be interesting to see how White Smoke goes about improving personal ads.
One thing I know is if they partner with large dating site, they automatically give up 50% of the purchase price and will have to see a heck of a lot of software to make a dent in the market. We'll see how they fare in the coming months.
Overall White Smoke seems to have a comprehensive product. The Dating version goes for $59.95. I'll have a demo report soon.
Calculate the "love levels" of the person on the other line with cell cell phone service from Nemesysco Entertainment. Chat someone up and when the conversation is over, the final report will be sent to your cell phone using SMS or audio message. Story at Trendhunter, service from LoveDetector.
There are some games that might work on a dating site, others, definitely not. When I was first learning Sudoku over Christmas, my family and I were yelling at each other so much and pencils were flying that I thought someone was going to loose an eye. We really enjoy each other's company too. I love Sudoku, and playing it in a multi-player environment could be cool, but probably a bit too frustrating for most people in a dating context.
I received an email from Dr. Yoav Zibin, who runs an Israeli company called Come2Play.
We make multiplayer games, which we try to sell to dating services. Currently we make normal casual games (like Chess, Backgammon, and stuff we invented like a multiplayer Sudoku), but we wish to make special games for dating. You can see our games in supereva, an Italian dating website, multiplayer.supereva.com, and MSN Israel.
Screaming "In YO Face!" at some woman you just met online during a heated round of Counterstrike is not conducive to establishing a relationship. Games that bring out your better side are more appropriate. Collaborative games that enable people to expose some of their personality and maybe win a few bucks or points towards highlighted profiles or other fee-based options are a good idea and worth exploring.
Userplane, Vivox or Skype for audio/visual, Thomas Technologies for personality profiling and Come2Play for interaction. A nice Friday bundle of services to make your site a little more sticky.
Happy Cinco de Mayo, I'm off to the beach for the weekend.
Mike Jones tells me Userplane is announcing Userplane Presence at OnHollywood today. Userplane Presence is a customizable, brand-able desktop app which enables users to stay online ad receive messges anytime.
A few simple lines of code added to your site is all it takes - letting you know who’s online, launch IM’s, deliver custom messages, and more.
Users can choose to install the optional custom desktop app, they can remain online even if they’re off your site - receiving messages, event-alerts, and accessing your custom menu of functions and URL’s. The configurable alert mechanism allows you to send individualized messages to users as you wish – remedying existing challenges like email blocks, creating new opportunities to stay connected with users, and significantly decreasing messaging costs.
You can add Userplane to your site here. The radio buttons in the signup form do not work in Firefox on the Mac, I had to switch to Safari to go through the signup process.
I thought I would take some time to find out about some of the value-added services that keep the Myspace economy humming.
When I started ProfileDoctor, I figured I would see what sort of cottage industry was going to spring up around dating sites. Back then, it's was PD, a few competitors and LookBetterOnline. A handful of companies emerging to take care of the needs of the industry. We all figured that dating sites were too busy running to the bank and buying Porches and that dating sites would welcome partners to help them keep their members happy. Boy were we wrong. No was a very popular words when dating sites were experiencing mega-growth rates. We all made money, but not nearly enough, because dating sites were not willing to trust their members with us. I'm not talking about all sites, but the top 25, which is where all the revenue is being generated and you would think they had the most to gain, or lose.
Fast forward a few years and pick up the Sunday NY Times and Businessweek. Myspace has 60 million profiles and SecondLife has a thriving cottage industry springing up within it's 3D world.
What we are seeing is that it is a lot easier to extract a few bucks from a lot of people for an impulse buy like a song or custom template than it is to provide photos or profile helpto the dating industry. Coaching is a different opportunity which doesn't scale well, so I'm not taking that into consideration here.
Most of these sites offer free or paid Myspace page generators, or what I would call profile editors.
All are plastered with Google Ads, which seems like the only way they are going to make any revenue. I'm sure a small percentage of Myspacers pay for custom templates.
Freecodesource.com has many different categories, from animated graphics, video clips, page dividers and even one called dolls. This weeks featured generator is called "The Automatic Myspace Whore Train Joiner.
Looking for the best possibly way to get friends fast? Introducting the Auto Whore Train Joiner. Usually from 1 train round you will usually receive around 2-4 friend requests, well multiply that by 28. Our generator will add you to the top 28 trains available and will dramatically increase your friend count.
It's simple just enter your Friend ID and click submit. On the next page simply post the bulletin and you will automatically be added to 28 Myspace Whore Trains.
What is the 'Friend Train'? It's your opportunity to gain massive friend requests. Users add themselves to the train then post the bulletin with the train in it on MySpace. In return, users that see the bulletin will send friend requests to the people on it. The train automatically clears and restarts every time it reaches 40 people.
• How many times can I enter my ID into one train?
Only once. If you try to enter it twice it will be rejected.
• Is there any chance I can be put on top of the train automatically all the time?
Yes. There is an available subscription. Please view the main page and click on the link for it.
• How many people can fit on one train?
40 people. It will automatically clear and restart when it reaches this number.
• How do I become a Featured Profile?
This is also an available subscription. Please view the main page and click on the link for it.
• Can I make my own script that will keep adding me to the train?
NO. Users caught practicing this technique will be suspended or banned without notice.
• What happens if I'm banned?
You will have to prove to an administrator that you are no longer going to do what you were banned for.
• What happens if I'm suspended?
Suspensions are not permanant. You can view how much time you have left by attempting you add yourself to the train.
Friend Trains are all about improving your popularity mojo, similar in some sense to PageRank. Most of them are full of fake profiles of hot women.
Pay a subscription fee and your profile will be featured. Sound familiar? They are taking a page from dating sites, coming up with simple and creative ways to make people more popular by making them easier to find.
Spend a few minutes at any of the sites listed above and you'll see that people are starting to make considerable money in the Myspace cottage industry, and we're not even talking about generators, tweaks and the other options that I haven't discovered yet.
When I talk about open profiles, I envision these types of value-added services offering enhancements to online daters. Some dating sites currently offer mild customization options, but nothing compared to what is available on Myspace. These tweaks often make pages more difficult to read, cluttered with junk and long page loads. The flip side is that people can express there personality in ways not possible on dating sites.
There is a middle ground, where simple web technologies can be used to help singles paint a more personalized portrait of themselves. After all, what is more personal than a personal ad?
There is not much I will watch on network television besides Lost and 24 and Numbers. The tv is often on but it's usually Netflix or cable. I was excited to learn that ABC is launching a a global interactive game based on Lost. The show will features a parallel story line which is not part of the tv show. I wonder if the new Lost game will have a page on Myspace? 4 8 15 16 23 42 for those in the know.
Last night I read the SecondLife expose in Businessweek which got me started thinking about the role of gameplay in social networking and online dating. As I am writing this I received an email from Oddcast, the creators of avatars you can use in anything from canned sales pitches to personalized emails. Bingoballroom.com is using Oddcast avatars to promote "bingo dates."
Bingo Ballroom worked with Oddcast to develop interactive banners that invite bingo enthusiasts to go on a "bingo date" with a talking avatar. Talking avatar banners also offer details on the latest promotions. The best part about these dates is that you can turn them off and you never have to share your winnings!
As an aside, I'm not a fan of team/group dating, I prefer to periodically play scrabble at my corner bar with my neighbors. I've chatted up women many times while playing, and even invited them to take my turn. It's an easy way to spark a conversation and gives us something to interact around instead of the old "can I buy you a drink" routine.
Have you come across sites that have mixed games with dating? What kind of games do you think would work? For example, it would be interesting for casual daters to have to answer questions in order to get access to certain people, like a mental capcha. Or, have the piece together clues in a profile to come up with a secret phrase that will unlock more of the profile, or the person's contact information.
Probably more for social networking sites than dating, but interesting none the less.
Ebay has made a jillion dollars using a seller recommendation system based on 1995 technology. KISS, Keep It Simple Stupid, was definitely the way to go for such a large and popular site.
TechCrunch says Rapleaf has created a full open version of eBay's feedback system, which will launch in May. Read the article for more details. Rapleaf blog.
Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world.
Open API's, mashups, all good stuff for developers looking to integrate RapLeaf with their services.
I've been waiting to see this for quite some time. Just goes to show that good ideas can be churned out quickly and relatively inexpensively these days. So many companies spend too much time thinking about concepts, plans and vision and less time delivering usable/beta service. RapLeaf makes other reputation and identity management companies seem glacial by comparison and they are in a position to land-grab potential market share if the product is any good.
Opinity, iKarma, Trufina, and other vendors in the reputation and identity management space have their work cut out for them. They have spent a lot of time and money working on entire identity ecosystems while scrappy groups like ClaimID have been churning out the pieces and parts in a few months.
There is a lot of new and exciting stuff coming in the identity and reputation management space. How dating companies leverage the emerging opportunities remains to be seen.
Reali-ity has created a mashup of last.fm and Pandora. This is the most useful merge of two different sites I've seen in a while. I've written about both services here and here. Finally something new and useful that isn't geared towards build-n-flip to Google or taking on Microsoft Office.
Eric at Pandora is complaining that they are not getting advertising dollars from the mashup. I totally agree with him. Mashups, RSS and the emergence of web services as opposed to websites are forcing companies that have no official relationship to play nicely. Reali-ity needs to throw up Adsense and split revenue with Pandora and last.fm. This should be part of some sort of Creative Commons contract.
These sorts of problems need to be addressed as dating and social networking and recommendation sites wise up and start offering RSS feeds of their profiles.
WIRED News has article about a new meta-dating service called Collaboradate. A few clarifications should to be made, as WIRED got some of the story incorrect. Collaborate is nothing like Trillian, which aggregates all your instant messenger accounts into a single window. Collaborate is basically a mashup of multiple dating sites. You can view free profiles but only contact people if you belong to the service. I wrote about dating site mashups last fall, and have written a few Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that merged Match.com and Yahoo Personals results together.
A few months ago I said:
After a while, I started thinking about a browser based on Mozilla that was tuned up with extensions and helper apps which facilitated managing multiple dating site accounts and especially profiles. A first step towards integrated profiles and cross-site subscriptions. Why wait for dating sites to federate when we can do the same thing in the browser?
This is somewhat near to the Collaboradate concept. I love the idea of a meta-dating service, but having to maintain yet another account at yet another site doesn't do it for me. This is one guy out of about a dozen people who are trying to create metadating sites. None of them have deals with the dating sites, they are just pulling profiles which is the easy part. A well-integrated and seamless browsing experience without random pay-walls is the only way this sort of thing is going to take off.
Collaboradate might be able to pull it off, but it's going to need more than DateMapping gimmicks and other beta features to make a big enough splash to matter. I hope they keep going with it, it's the nicest mashup I've seen so far.
Imagine a day in the future when you or an algorithm determine who you should date based on what sites you visit and what sites your prospective dates visit. You wouldn’t even need to fill out a 500 question compatibility test. Would you really want to date someone that actually did that, anyways?
This is the lead in for a recent Root Blog post. The CEO of Root Markets, Seth Goldstein, then goes on to coind a new phrase, "clickstream dating."
Root Markets, or Root.net, lets people “recycle, refine and optimize (their) attention,” Goldstein said. That means that by downloading Root Markets software, people can keep an online “vault” of their Internet footprints, from the point of logging on, up until their last click.
Root’s software tracks behavior and provides a picture of personal habits in the form of digital visualizations. People will also be able to share profiles with friends to track overlapping interests, or attract new mates, in what Goldstein called “click stream dating.”
What Seth doesn't seem to take into consideration is that dating sites already do this to some degree. While I'm the first to admin that the rudimentary matching some sites perform based on a few database fields is not the same as mining a long-tail clickstream, the idea is by no means new.
I'm fascinated by the idea of leveraging anonymous clickstreams to find matches on dating sites, or social and business networking for that matter. I've been writing about behavioral targeting on dating sites for a long time, although in the context of advertising. What better marketing profiles is there than a personal ad?
Here's how I would implement clickstream-augmented dating.
Finding commonalities between the websites and blogs people read is easy. Almost too easy.
I would instead initially, limit the clickstream to dating sites. I doubt that I'm going to meet many women who visit the same websites as I do, and we're assuming that similarities attract, not opposite.
There is a whole new type of matching engine that will have to be created on top of the raw clickstream data. Here is where I would add something like Icosystem's proprietary Hunch Engine, as a starting point, after it's been loaded with a base clickstream algorithm.
We can go from looking at static profiles to a real-time dynamic display of the relationships between an ecosystem of people and yourself, with dials to weight certain attributes more than others and the ability to zoom in on the important stuff using profile clustering.
Last year I threw a bunch of dating sites, founders, and VC into Prefuse. You can see it here. Take the output from the Hunch Engine and display it with a nice graphing engine like Prefuse. Make it fun to explore, without it looking like an Xbox game, er wait a minute.
Root Valult has an enormous amount of security, safety and PR management to accomplish before any of this really takes off past the 250 early adopters that even know what the "Attention Economy" means. This is going to be interesting to watch unfold. It took the digerati a few years to get behind metadata and tagging, I think general people and the media will catch on to the Attention Economy much faster. It's easier to grok outright and basically targeted towards marketers at this point. There's a lot of money to be made on this, right from the get-go, which is not always the case.
Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch and Om predict that Yahoo is coming out with a new version of their IM client next week. Ever since I started using Adium for most of my IM needs I haven't missed the musty old version of Yahoo's chat client on my Mac. That said, I totally dig the Avatars in Yahoo IM, even if they can't move. The new client will have a new voice core and be able to call regular phones, excellent.
Vivox came up with the phrase "graduated communication" which describes the act of moving from wink to IM to video seamlessly within the context of a conversation. I like the phrase contextual communication even better, but then this morning I realized I'm more comfortable with the term "progressive communication", so that's what I'm going to call it. Progressive means you're advancing through phases, whereas contextual or gratudated, well, I don't think that's intuitive enough for most people.
Stu Milberg, Monty Sharma and my neighbor Rob Seaver from Vivox were out at Spring VON, which turned out to be a great show. VOIP is hot, getting tons of VC interest and the marketing people haven't even gotten involved yet. Most of what I hear is engineering, little talk about what you can do with VOIP past cheap phone calls. I wasn't at VON and am catching up on blogs to see what was going on in the hallways, where the action really lives.
Vivox ran a pre-conference workshop titled Communication for Communities:
In this pre-conference Summit, Vivox brings together industry experts and innovators to explore and examine the end-game of advancing VoIP technology – context-specific communications. Weaving the basic forms of communication, voice, video, messaging, and presence is the core of context-specific communications. Its objective: advancing interactions and bringing real-world energy into online communities seamlessly and securely.
Attend this Summit and learn:
* About the next evolution for VoIP
* What context-specific communications is and how it builds community and loyalty
* What technologies are empowering this wave of innovation and communication
* Which online communities are driving the change
* How businesses are deploying it and the benefits they’re seeing in revenues and customer growth, retention and satisfaction
I just saw that Steve Smith from Lavalife was part of the session as well. There was also a session on called "High Risk/High Value Communications: Online Dating and Global Social Networking". Speakers include Joe Hertzbach, Business Manager, A Virtual Match, Steve Smith, Chief Scientist, Lavalife Corp., Michael Sherrod, My Family Inc. and moderated by Rob Seaver, Founder & CEO, Vivox.
Good panel, where's the podcast?
Turns out I had coffee in Steve's home town of Carlisle, MA this week. Small world indeed.
Realtors are showing my building right now so I had to evacuate for a few hours to avoid the disruption. I'm at Starbucks, $10 for a day of wifi. Right about now I'd like to be working and listening to profiles on my Nano, which I forgot to bring so I am dealing with what they call adult contemporary.
I've got my Powerbook here, but what if I had left it at home and brought along my iPod? How would I remember or rate people I've listened to while I'm jogging, walking or sipping a latte? I see at PodDater that you can rate people on the site, but what about when you're untethered?
Answer: use the song rating feature on iPods. I don't have a video iPod but I bet the feature exists for videos too. This feature is usually accessible via the scroll wheel, much like the volume control.
Rate a bunch of people and when you return, sync up with Itunes, which should upload the ratings to PodDater.
I like walks in the rain, 2 Stars, I have 9 cats, 1 Star, I love my Powerbook, 4 Stars, my friends call me quirkydelicious, 5 Stars.
I have no idea of PodDater is thinking about this, if they use it, just put $25 on my Starbucks card as a token of appreciation.
Jack Mardack left a very interesting comment in the post about synthetic validity. I tried to leave a comment on his blog but it was a real pain so here it is.
He says:
Whether you will be heartened or discouraged by developments such as this (new personalty testing systems) depends on whether you presume that the Web's greater service to human relationships will be as *medium* or as *tool*.
He was talking to Fernando, who is all about finding a better hammer when it comes to personality testing. The problem with this particular breed of hammer is that it is not easy to judge their effectiveness outside of the lab.
An excellent point. Testing systems (tools) are licensed by dating sites (the medium). In the case of online dating, you have to have a medium to be able to use the tools.
Here are a few examples of why tests are so problematic. 20% of the emails I receive from women on dating sites usually say “the service doesn’t think we are a match but I wanted to say hi because I like your profile.”
Talk about getting off to a rocky start. Either I am a good BS’er in my profile, I was not honest on the test, the test is flawed or the other person is not answering questions honestly.
Not easy to pinpoint the problem, is it? Recently, thousands of children got back incorrect grades on their SAT's due to a malfunction in the system. And we expect consumers to trust a free personality test on a dating site?
I would like to see a study of online daters that takes a serious look at the number of people who take tests, how much they trust/rely on the outcome, and how often they reach out or respond to people “off the reservation” who not not fit into their matching criteria.
The idea of going out to public places to meet people is that in one evening you are saturated with the sights, smells and personalities of potentially thousands of people. All of these experiences inform us about what type of people we seek, and should be used in conjunction with online dating sites.
I would rather meet people in an group situation (online or off), find the people I want to talk more with then take it from there. Much more natural. Online, I realize that this is almost impossible online due to the male inability to respect women when they are not F2F, but that is where Jack's statement of evolving people for online use rings true.
It's obvious that people need to be more comfortable with voice and video on dating sites. Accountability is important factor. The exposure and trust levels must be mediated via technology, and a feedback loop linked to reputation is absolutely necessary. If you act like a jerk, people won’t talk to you, simple as that. Same online as off. How difficult is it to build in repercussions, like a time out or bad rating?
The current crop of tools, WeAttract, Backgroundchecks, Vivox, Userplane, are leading the next generation of online dating tools. How they are integrated into the medium, and how people will actually end up using them, is unknown. That's why I like open services. Throw the profiles out there and let people remix tools and services to come up with the next big thing. For example, where the heck is the third party matchmaker API?
Why are we still relying on static profiles, broken search engines and stagnant dating site technology? The medium is mired in mud, it's up to these toolmakers to pull us up and out of it.
A new trend is emerging where free dating sites add the phrase Skype on their home page and call themselves the next generation of online dating. Let me say it here once and for all. Starting a new dating or social networking site with a core differentiator solely based on Skype or any other VOIP service will not become profitable to a degree where the business can be considered a success.
Smart companies looking to partner with dating and social networking sites have focused on making simple integration a high priority and kept the cost low, going for market share instead of six-figure licensing deals. Adding in Skype costs as much as the time it takes for developers to add a few logos and a link on the profile page. That's clearly not enough, additional strategy and resources must be allocated to come up with a plan that will actually deliver favorable results.
I read about VerbDate at SkypeJournal. The site is a perfect example of throwing a bunch of Web 2.0 buzzwords into a blender, building 1/2 a website, launching and leaving it that way for six months. A quick search shows the site currently has 55 members. I wonder why? The site is unpolished and inconsistent and the stated goal of the company is to "to kick the incumbents big fat ass!" Then they go on to say they have partnered with Skype, which is bunk.
For two years I've been saying it costs at least $3-5 million dollars to get to the 100,000 paying subscriber mark. No one has refuted this except optimistic startup entrepreneurs who base their entire business model on "new" marketing and branding concepts and pray to the gods of viral marketing.
That's why VerbDate and it's brethren will most likely never succeed. I'm all for supporting two people in the proverbial garage starting up the next big thing, but there is a level of sophistication that a dating site needs to attain before it will be truly be taken seriously by the general public. Most of the press releases and emails I get are from sites that fail to address this important issue.
A question to those of you who run ad-supported sites, let us know in the comments what you consider a successful free site. My general take is that more people + higher quality members&site = greater revenue. I'd like to see if anyone is making more money with targeted advertising on a smaller niche site as opposed to a generic ad network serving of mortgage loan ads on a large free site.
Free social networking sites let members add all sorts of plug-in functionality for free. YouTube and 100 other companies offer free file and video-sharing applications, music players and so on to Myspacers. Most of these features don't run on the social networking site, so the cost is negligible.
Innovation for the dating and social networking industry is good, but at what cost?
When the user starts the hunch engine he is presented with a seed -- a starting point -- and a set of mutations. The user selects mutations that look promising in his eyes, and the application uses that selection to generate another set of mutations, continuing in that fashion until the user is satisfied with what he sees. Call it guided natural selection, where the selector for fitness is what looks good to the human in front of the monitor.
Taking into consideration that men are more concerned with looks than women (according to researchers), the Hunch Engine represents the evolution of common gallery views, which are quite useful for browsing large amounts of people quickly and efficiently.
Bruce Sterling is the author of many incredible science fiction books. He's also a heck of a writer and an eloquent speaker. I saw him a few years ago at Harvard Coop and he blew my mind, same as he did 10 years ago when I first saw him speak at Amherst. His rant at SXSW last week doesn't fail to impress.
I love the part about 1/4 way down where he puts Google up against AI guru Allan Turing's artificial intelligence engine.
When I think about it: do I really WANT some classical Artificial Intelligence computer that can talk to me just like Alan Turing? Or do I prefer Google? Imagine two start-up companies. One of 'em has got Alan Turing's disembodied talking head inside a box, but no search engines. In the other company, they have no AI, but they get to use Google. Which company out-competes the other? One company asks: where do I find a cheap supplier? In response, they get a really genius math lecture by Alan Turing. Alan is really sincere about it, he's really thinking hard about the problem of supply, there inside his box. The other company has Google, so in about ten seconds they not only find a supplier but all kinds of massively popular links to other suppliers. Which company wins?
The passage reminded me of the battle over who's scientific matching algorithm is the best. Dating sites more interactive in nature would not necessitate 500 questions being asked of each member. Throw them a test or two to self-identify and filter on a few key personality attributes and leave it to the people figure it out themselves. Dating people you met taking a test on the Interweb is weird enough.
Sometimes people don't know what's best for them. Often it's up to someone to come along and blow their mind by introducing something totally new.
In tandem with whatever personality testing/profiling product wins the hearts and minds of online daters, introduce the concept of graduated communication, offer them a headset with a mic and maybe a webcam. Provide some guidance and a helping hand and let them be humans.
Piers Steel at the University of Calgary was nice enough to respond to my request for more information about his mathematical formula called Synthetic Validity; A mathematical theory that attempts to bridge the gap between individuals' personalities and abilities. Synthetic Validity, while being touted as the next big thing in Human Resources, may also be a good fit for the online dating industry.
I think pheromones are better for compatibility testing but what do I know?
Here's what Mr. Steel has to say:
Originally designed for industry and their stricter requirements (e.g., able to withstand legal challenges), synthetic validity is a methodology to create a fully automatic selection system. By changing the metric from job performance to relationship satisfaction, you can use it to select romantic partners as well. In fact, it is much easier to use it for dating. It is simply putting “soul mate” selection on a firm measurement and scientific foundation, taking advantage of 100 years of selection research.
The methodology is complex in parts, and if you want to know how it works, you can download a copy directly.
However, be sure that it does work. The International Journal of Selection and Assessment, where it was published, is a peer-reviewed top management journal that specializes in this topic (see http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0965-075X). This is the sum of decades of effort and it starting to come under an increasingly amount of press:
Peter thinks the Globe and Mail article does the best at summarizing the process, so if you have trouble accessing it, here is a key paragraph:
The mathematics involved are complex, but the idea itself is devilishly simple. First, a particular job is broken down into a series of behaviours -- common building blocks that could be assembled in different combinations to describe any kind of work. Coaching others, or a customer-service orientation are examples of such building blocks. Then, the predictors of those behaviours, from tests of individuals, are ascertained. The next, and most complicated step, is to establish the relationship between the two.
As it applies to dating, the methodology begins with breaking down relationship satisfaction into fundamental elements (e.g., physical, emotional, intellectual) that encompass the important parts of any relationship. The association between each of these elements and any predictor (pretty much anything you can quantify) is determined. To apply it to new candidate, they simply indicate what relationship elements are most important to them and how much. After that, the algorithms take over and provide your results.
What can it do?
1. To begin with, it can provide an overall ranking as well as break it down to specific relationship domains. In other words, it tells you who are overall the best as well what areas of the relationship they will likely excel at.
2. Because you have it overall as well as by life domains, there are a variety of measurement issues that come into play that improves your accuracy of prediction. For example, people can weight what life areas are most important to them (e.g., adventure, work, religion).
3. You can start to investigate generalizability, determining how many different life domains can be meaningfully separated (this will again help prediction).
4. To prevent user fatigue, you can use different sets of predictive tests. You can start with a brief selection system, provide increasingly complex assessment in stages, or use full-blown selection. You will able to predict at each stage.
5. You can select for short-term as well as long-term attraction and happiness. We ran into this problem in personnel selection a while ago. Some people were great out of the gate but slow in the stretch. The solution is time-varying covariates, but it requires gathering data at many stages of the relationship.
6. You can give confidence intervals around expected satisfaction at any time and how the relationship is expected to progress.
7. You can mathematically determine what set of predictors works the best.
You can also start moving beyond simply selection and provide advice.
1. You can point area of strength and “hot spots,” where tension is likely to arise.
2. You can suggest areas of personal improvement that will help people interest those they would be happy with.
Again, the choice of predictors is pretty much whatever you want; as long as the predictor is quantifiable, you can incorporate it in to the selection system. Consequently, it would make sense to develop a culture of constant improvement. Let different predictors compete against one another by constantly feeding the system new data (by the way, the new data is NOT simply responses on predictor tests alone). You still will retain backward compatibility. That is, later users will be even better matched but you can still provide services to those who have to yet to update their profiles.
It short, your dating system should be more accurate and provide richer feedback than anything else in the market and furthermore there are clear steps for constant improvement to maintain that advantage. If you want to explore using this methodology, contact Ian Bell at the Technological Transfer unit at the University of Calgary.
Update: Here's a list of 10 more scientific papers about theories of romantic relationships development.
Userplane is rolling out new features over the next few months. The following was part of an email sent to clients.
Userplane Presence Although some Userplane clients have implemented infrastructure necessary to handle the burden of messaging and presence – many of our clients prefer to have this complex overhead offloaded entirely to Userplane. We will be releasing (as an optional service) an API for comprehensive web-presence that will eliminate strain on your servers and dramatically improve Userplane application performance.
Desktop Presence (including message & alert broadcasting)
This new lightweight, downloadable desktop application will allow your users to remain "present" on your site regardless of actually being on your site – around the clock. Not only will this enhance your online numbers and foster more constant member communication, you will be able to deliver off-site messages and alerts anytime. The application will have a persistent background connection with your web-presence system and/or Userplane's XML and presence infrastructure. The application itself will be very customizable - sitting unobtrusively in the PC system tray - allowing you to deliver content directly to the desktop, list all desktop-presence users online, and launch IM windows without having users log into your actual website.
Anonymous Calling Userplane will be releasing an anonymous calling function to plug into the existing application suite. This will be a premium paid calling service built directly into the interface and will be set up to generate a payment transaction back to your site.
In addition to these core upcoming features, stay tuned for updates around additional skinning options, Webmessenger content archiving, SMS integration, and many other new features we believe will greatly enhance your community!
I'm liking this new trend of enhanced presence, which Userplane and Vivox are both focusing on.
Stickier dating sites could mean more advertising dollars and subscription revenue, although definitive metrics of the benefits are difficult to come by.
My initial reaction is that for dating sites,
I am not a fan of yet another app running in the system tray. Both companies would do well to integrate with existing messenger applications and drop the custom clients. But existing IM clients don't have the functionality of these next-generation messaging application.
A conundrum. Who needs another IM window to deal with? I have Skype, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, ICQ, Jabber gateway, soon Myspace (probably never on Mac though).
I spend about two hours a day in Skype and an hour on IM. My presence is built into them, and global forwarding to my mobile phone is right around the corner. I'll pay $9.95 a month to forward all my communications to whatever device I'm on, sometimes several during the course of a normal day. Adapt to how I use the devices, not the other way around.
I go to dating sites to go look at dating sites. The whole always-on aspect makes me suspicious. I want to go in, check messages, send a few, and then get outta there. I want to spend the least amount of time on the site or in the chat as possible. I don't want that stuff popping up at work, although I like the idea of it being routed to my phone when I'm bored. Makes me feel wanted, powerful feature.
Most people come home and check their email for a bit, is this where extended presence will become beneficial? Why would you want to have users communicate when they are not logged into your website? Unless there is a way to log their actions, wouldn't that reduce visitor ranking? Why not just send my daily matches to my IM client or RSS feed and do away with the website entirely?
Devil's advocate I may be, but the value proposition for dating sites is still unclear because the revenue stream is dependent on a promise, not cash in the bank except for anonymous calling.
Anonymous calling will be useful to some, maybe Mike Jones at Userplane or Rob Seaver at Vivox will chime in to provide additional information about the average costs of the service and the other benefits of their offerings.
The question is why pay for it when you can get it for free, or close to it, on Skype or soon Yahoo and AIM? Because most net denizens are not savvy enough, especially in the dating space, and perhaps prefer tight integration with the site they belong too and don't want to be bothered with all the other stuff. Nobody knows much more than this at this point, will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
Avatars are hot. I've got 'em in SecondLife, Yahoo Chat, not to mention a few for bulletin board posting. Yahoo chat avatars are the easiest to create but you can't do much with them, they just stand there. However, I love the audibles. Flirting, taunting and soundbites from bands add a lot of laughs to the conversation.
IMVU is similar to Yahoo Chat avatars, taking it to the next level with a window for interacting with other avatars, and general movements. Kind of like SecondLife Lite. Here's a review of IMVU. I tried IMVU last year and was not impressed. PC only, clunky and it crashed a lot. Today it looks a lot more polished, enough that Allegis Capital and Menlo Ventures pumped $9 million dollars into the company. PaidContent describes IMVU as a cross between avatar-based services, IM and social networking.
That is a heck of a lot of cash for a 3D chat company, especially after you see CrazyTalk. As one of the founders of the Boston Computer Society Virtual Reality Group in 1993, I'm more excited by CrazyTalk, which is almost movie-quality CGI. Reallision, the makers of CrazyTalk, offer a studio for creating avatars, a messenger product and virtual hosts like Oddcast. They have a deal with Skype, and it's very cool to use while chatting.
Everyone is in a rush to offer add-in avatars and video and photo-sharing services to Myspace. The problem with the Myspace add-ins is that only a small percentage of users will pay for them, you have to either license your product or stuff it with ads or try to lure people back to your website. I can't imagine VC thinking they are investing in a free MySpace add-in, they're probably betting they can find find someone to buy the company.
Enticing people to download yet another instant messaging client is going to be very difficult. IMVU is a kludgy PC-only application with windows 3.1 interface populated mostly by teenagers. Competition is fierce and offers far more mature products and services. Yahoo chat is free, works great and the Mac version is coming out shortly.
IMVU is not a clear winner by any means and they have their work cut out for them.
I've continued to unsubscribe from about 20 different dating sites, focusing on the leaders in the date-warehouse and niche sites, free and paid. That's 4, which is about all I can handle at the moment.
Yahoo wasn't doing anything for me, cya later, for the time being.
FastCupid continues to deliver the goods, primary site I check daily. I'm loving the blogs, groups and don't care about the terrible user interface anymore. Small price to pay to reach my demographic.
Match is an old standby, the bellwether of the industry, even if Yahoo is marginally larger.
I've never received an email worth responding to on a free dating site. Free may be the new paid, but not for me.
Of course I'm on Myspace. I use it primarily to keep in touch with my cousins, they are rabid Myspacers and keep me in the know. I'm not going to bother with Hi5 and the others, not enough value for me to take the time to get established. Tagworld is worth checking out though, cleaner UI, and what I thought was going to be a more mature (over 25) audience which does not seem to be the case based on the college-age sirens on the home page. Certainly doesn't share the freaky circus-like graphics of myspace which are a total turn off.
Speaking of turn offs, today I went to update my Match profile, and most of my profiles settings were reset! No wonder I was not getting many emails! Talk about bad news. I wonder what caused this?
After clarifying that I'm not looking for large women over 50, I visited Webdate for kicks. Webdate is good for voyerism, although the fake nails and bleach-blonde hair of 90% of the members has me hearing the sounds of chewing gum bubbles popping incessantly.
Look the the similarities between the turn ons and turn offs for each. Webdate totally ripped off Match. Besides the fact that these are pretty lame questions to begin with, for Webdate to blatantly copy Match, is even lamer. Shame on you.
SiliconBeat writes about Geovector, which puts a compass sensor in your cell phone, letting you point at places to retrieve information, read reviews, initiate calls and more. This is incredible stuff, although it's available only in Japan for the time being.
While you can't just yet point your phone at someone to see their profile, it's a giant step closer to usable location-based services.
There is no reason why people-discovery via mobile phones has to be done by dating companies.
It's straightforward to pipe a profile to a phone, that's mildly iteresting. The problem so far is that the search features have been far too general to be useful. Searching for people based in your mobile's cell tower range is a lot more useful than zip code search because dating sites tend to loosen zip code restrictions based on the number of responses. Why not have profiles directly embedded in the phone? I'm still waiting for simple cell tower or bluetooth based people search that work on more than a few phones in the US.
This stuff isn't going to take off until MyspaceMobile offers the service, then it's going to spread like wildfire.
I've been playing around with Last.fm, the popular music recommendation engine. The service reads the list of songs I play in iTunes and creates a profile used by Last.fm to recommend other people and music I may like based on what I've been listening to. After looking into Last.fm and other music recommendation services like Pandora, I came across the iTunes Signature Maker.
iTunes Signature Maker (iTSM) analyzes your music collection and creates a short audio signature to represent who you are and what you listen to. After it checks your system configuration and asks you a few simple questions, iTSM will spend a few minutes analyzing your collection and generating the audio signature.
The website for the service even states:
Maybe you'll load your iTunes signature onto your iPod, e-mail it to some friends, share it in our signature gallery, or stick it on your home page. Maybe it will help you gauge your compatibility with your next blind date: "She seems nice enough, but her iTunes signature is just so atonal! Should I go with my heart or with my ear?
What a great idea. Let's see someone Match Meyer's Briggs and other tests with their musical counterparts. How much do you think you would learn from listening to a few minutes of someone's iPod? Listen to my Itunes Signature.
This is sure to be a first. According to CNET, Wiriadi Sutrisno works as a physiotherapist in California, and Rita Sri Mutiara Dewi is from the Indonesian city of Bandung.
"We've exchanged photos, chat almost daily and often call each other, but we've never met," Dewi was quoted as saying.
Sutrisno proposed over the internet, and they finally exchanged wedding vows in a ceremony using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology.
The happy couple won't have to wait much longer to see each other in person--Dewi is scheduled to fly to the United States later this month.
We're getting past the time when people belong to a single dating/socialnetworking/affinity site. I am not only a single guy, and that's not how I'm introduced to new company, so why should I only have a profile on a date-warehouse, when I want to be on an exercise dating site, a site for snowboarders, a Mac community then then don't forget I want to hook up with my old friends on Facebook. What makes me me is my connection with each of these communities.
Tags are a big step in the right direction, but I want more. This brings us back to open user-controlled profiles, which I hope someone talks about at iDate.
I have something like 47 profiles at the moment. I've already un-subbed from about 25 dating sites, the rest are banking, social networking, publishing network preferences and so on.
Recently I attempted editing a few fields on each profile and it took over two hours because I had changed email addresses over time, forgotten passwords and otherwise had to battle with sites to unlock my profile to make changes. A real pain to say the least.
My days of daily participation in 15 or so dating sites are nearing the end. I've done the big-box sites, I've done the niche sites, I've done golfing sites (and I don't even golf) and many others for a long time now.
Just let me subscribe to my matches with my RSS news reader because your design isn't what I want, your features don't address my specific needs and from now on you're going to have to try a lot harder to win my business because you don't seem to understand how to design a service for real people with real lives, expectations and time constraints. Tone down ego, get off of pedestal,
get out in the streets, talk to people, take 1/4 of your marketing budget and move it over to R&D, and go out and make a few mistakes, I promise it won't hurt much and you'll learn a lot more than you can imagine.
Oh, and before I forget, kudos to Match for doing a decent job copying over your Match photos and info to Chemistry.com.
Now that Consumating and CNET have been getting it on for a while, Consumating has taken advantage of the CNET network and warp-speed servers and released the first update, popularity by tag and zip code. Tag/zip intersection queries would bring most dating site server to a crawl. Which is a nice benefit to the CNET relationship. Ben also updated the way the popularity index looks and works, looks much nicer now.
The people on Consumating remind me of the people on the old Spring Street Networks - the coolest of the cool singles. They're probably all on Myspace too, but then again my cousin's baby is two weeks old and I believe he has a Myspace profile already. Which reminds me, I need to buy the little guy a share of Apple and Google stock, or at least a short because Google at $700 reminds me of the Dow at 14,000 hype of a few years ago.
Online dating is really a misnomer. As I've often said, people don't date at a dating site. Dating sites are really online introduction services. They peruse profiles and the dating site acts as an intermediary, passing along anonymous emails and IM's. Look at a photo, feel the butterflies, send an email, move the conversation over to Hotmail or Yahoo email and then possibly meet up. Rinse, repeat.
After a few months the online dating experience is getting tired. That's why the average subscription length is 3 months. The initial thrill in on the wane. Besides the emotional exhaustion, there is nothing to do at most dating site besides stare at profiles.
No wonder less than one half of all singles uses online dating sites in the US.
While visiting a dating site is strictly a utilitarian exercise, at a social networking site I can click a friend, click their friends, and an hour later I'm 76 degrees away from where I started, listening to a new rock band and perusing more scantily clad co-eds than a frat house party. Talk about pageviews! These services can group people together based on interests, location, age, sexual preference, music and so on. Or, the members can self-identify and seek out others via pronouncements on their profiles or using tags.
What if you had more options for interacting with people on a dating site? What if dating became more like social networking?
Last week I met with Vivox, a company with the vision to take online dating to the next level. Vivox develops tools and services to help daters communicate easier, safer, and on on their own terms. Vivox sees an opportunity to increase the volume and value of interactivity on dating sites. Stickier sites tend to retain members more, and for free sites, ad dollars increase. Instead of ceding control of the dating experience to the dating site operator, Vivox is positioned to put the power back into the hands of daters.
There are a whole slew of companies who have tried to enter the online dating space with anonymous phone numbers, background checks, click-to-call, double-blind email addresses and other safety and communication features. Most of these companies saw the spike in online dating revenue, rewrote their marketing plane to include the dating vertical, and sponsored a few parties at trade shows, only to fade off into the distance when they realized how stubborn and reluctant dating sites are to change, especially when it comes to technology.
What's interesting is that Vivox can do all of these things. The company is not a one-trick pony, which is partly why other companies have has such a difficult time partnering with dating sites. Why partner with 5 sites when you can get the same features and functionality from one, and them some?
Vivox in a nutshell is all about contextual communication and presence awareness. For the demo I saw, users download a chat client, which is used to communicate with others on the pal lists, regardless if they are logged into the originating dating site or not. The chat client has several features not found in most IM clients which aren't public at this time. The features I saw were centered around controlling and managing the pace and tempo of dating online.
As we move from POTS (plain old telephone service) to VOIP (voice over internet protocol), companies like Vivox are busy figuring out how to integrate our everyday communication with our online lives. Regular IM is not very flexible. Either we're talking or we're not. You see me as online or I'm not. Most IM clients can't route messages, they just save them for later. Vivox has the technical chops and back-end services to do all kinds of interesting things with your online communication, whether it be voice, IM or group chat. They also have 500,000 existing users.
During an average day, I'm IM'ing from my desktop or phone, or chatting from either. I'm taking inbound calls from some people, not others. I'm doing conference calls and interviews over Skype, I'm checking messages, leaving messages, reading chat transcripts and more. Then I go to check my dating sites, and I stare at static profiles.
Userplane has done a good job getting their chat client on several major dating and social networking sites. They have proven that singles like to chat online, in the context of the dating experience.
To understand the full impact of what Vivox can offer, you have to think of the chat client being the conduit to a full range of other services. Anyone who has actually logged more than 10 minutes in a dating chat knows that the same blather that goes on in Yahoo chat rooms goes on in dating site chat rooms.
Whereas Userplane doesn't control communication between two or more parties, Vivox provides a level of control that may make it much easier and comfortable for people to jump into chat rooms, identify like-minded people and create ad hoc communities of interest.
I was keenly aware that i was only grokking part of the whole picture during the demo. Each time I asked "but can it do so-and-so" I would get a knowing look and I would start to rant about a feature, only to hear "that's coming soon." Vivox clearly understands how people communicate, and their ideas about how we will communicate in the future remain intriguing.
Vivox will offer tiered communication levels (free vs. paid) and say they are keen to adapt to the needs of the dating industry (read, flexible to varied integration requirements).
Vivox has the vision to change the face of online dating. Vision is the easy part, the devil is in the details. Putting together deals with dating sites may prove to be more of an uphill battle than they expected. They can always choose to offer the services directly to consumers, but integration with at least a few major dating sites will be central to their success in the dating space.
The lumbering juggernaut we like to call Match.com has added tagging to profiles. Except they call them MatchWordsTM. Go, go metadata! I was wondering how long it would take for a major dating site to get with the tagging program.
One small, problem, the tags are broken and don't work at the moment. Oops.
"MatchWords are an exciting new way of finding people with common interests. Add your own MatchWords to your profile, and get in on the excitement now." As with tagging pioneer Consumating, Match members click a word to see more profiles tagged with the same word.
Clicking the plus sign next to a word to add that word to your profile. You can't tag other people, which is understandable and probably a good thing. Can you imagine the nasty things people would tag each other?
They even, gasp, display tags as a tag cloud, at least in a static graphic on my home page. I don't see evidence of tag clouds anywhere else though. Now I can't find any reference to the tag cloud, where did it go? If you're not a blogger or read tech blogs, tag clouds are probably a new concept. The idea is to display a list of all tags people use, popular tags being larger font, different color, and so on. The problem with this display style is that most people click the big bold tags instead of the small ones, perpetuation words like "blonde, sexy, legs and hottieinnyc."
The main Matchwords page has the top 10 most popular words and top 10 most recently added. This is exactly how not to implement tags. Tags are great for looking for the obscure, the hard-to-find, the little phrase thats going' to connect you to the person of your dreams. Travel, golf and family? Totally useless phrases. Match needs to treat tags differently than generic keyword searches.
A link to to the top 1,000 tags is broken into men and women, nice touch.
They have created a list of starter words for everyone. They were a bit too broad for my liking, so I removed several and added a few more. I tried a few risque words. Boobs and ass are not valid. b00bs and A$$ are awaiting approval. All of George Carlin's 7 dirty words are filtered. I can't wait to see how far Match will let people go with tags. Tags awaiting approval or not valid are listed below your tag list. the invalid list of words is going to be huge in about 5 hours.
It's an easy way to see what tags are most popular. When it's working correctly, http://www.match.com/matchwords/brownhair should take you to all profiles tagged with "brownhair."
As per the status quo, Match has sprinkled information about Matchwords across the site. Inconsistent user interface guidelines on the site have resulted in various faux pas such as rolling over the "New" icon brings up a link to the FAQ page, but people have no idea the New icon is a link unless they roll over it accidentally.
In other places, Match links to a Matchwords howto article in Happen Magazine. Nothing I like more than reading about new features while looking at boobs.
Dating sites should go out and do as Match has done, just make sure to call tags something besides Matchwords. Matchphrases is a logical choice. I like the phrase so much I just registered the domain. Soon enough, you'll be able to search tags across multiple sites (hint hint).
You may remember HandwritingProfiles CEO Michael Kahlowsky doing handwriting analysis at SITRAS in Miami last year. I took an adult ed class on handwriting analysis once, fascinating stuff. My prediction for compatibility assessment.
From BoingBoing: Psychiatrists from Pavia University have associated early romantic love with a biochemical known as nerve growth factor (NGF).
Apparently, levels of NGF in the bloodstream were significantly higher in subjects who were in the early stages of romance than individuals not in a relationship. Interestingly, "subjects in love who—after 12–24 months—maintained the same relationship but were no longer in the same mental state to which they had referred during the initial evaluation" did not have elevated NGF levels.
Dating circa 2012: Personality tests are passe. Swabbing partners CSI-style on first dates is where it's at. Biochemicallove.com is available, have at it.
This week I spoke with Userplane CEO Mike Jones, who tells me Userplane is offering permanent profiles for their freead-supported app clients users.
Anyone can still jump in with just a screen name assuming they set up the app to work that way, but for users that want permanent screen names, photos, and profiles – there are two new buttons: “Create Profile” and “Login”. These new accounts work across the entire network of Userplane Instant Communities unless individual sites choose to restrict access.
For Users
• Customize profiles: who can see and what is seen
• Search and browse profiles
• Live invite-a-friend
• Room alerts
All user information, features, and content created in a site’s Userplane will soon be accessible to the site admin through web administration and a standards-based API. Sites will not only be able to monitor and adjust their Userplane, they will also be able to creatively leverage their new community beyond Userplane.
Users of Userplane's free chat product can create a profile which you will soon be able to share with other free users Userplane profiles, similar to how it works on Yahoo.
Users on sites using Userplane's paid chat product will be able to share their profile with others users, but only on that particular service.
If I belong to a dating site like Date.com, which uses Userplane paid chat client, I'm able to view other Date.com members' Userplane profiles.
The key phrase is "Services will also be able to creatively leverage their new community beyond Userplane." Mike says more features will be rolled out shortly.
The buzz over GoogleBase continues. People Profiles are one of the drop-down category options found in the service when it was publicly available for a brief time this week.
Using the bulk upload function (think of GoogleBase as a giant public database), a free dating site could upload all their profiles, leverage the benefits of Google traffic, Adwords revenue, tagging, powerful search and all of the other Google Services, from GoogleMaps to Froogle.
Think about open profiles, federation between dating sites, new tiers of pricing and services, bundling deals, targeted marketing and everything else people will think of once the service is live.
Unaffiliated singles could post a profile to Google, taking an end run around existing dating sites. I envision the creation of cottage industries developing whole new layers of value-added services- dating butlers, real-time virtual coaching, date ideas based on GoogleLocal, profile enhancement, all formed with Web 2.0 technology, shorter time-to-market and entrepreneurial innovation that we haven't seen since the dawn of online dating.
More when the site launches, which should be any day now.
Every once in a while I freshen up my various profiles. New headlines, new photos, new interests, reflecting the ever-changing me.
My checklist of sites to revisit goes something like this:
Various dating sites
Myspace, Friendster
Tribe.net, Yahoo 360
LinkedIn,Guru.com
Plazes
And so on.
This week I tagged a photo of myself on Flickr as "single" and pasted my dating profile alongside, so now I have to add that to my watch-list. This got me thinking about all of the clever ways people are starting to utilize Web 2.0 services in ways the creators haven't initially expected.
One of the most interesting things about Web2.0 is the notion of remixing web services.
Flickr has tags, search, photostreams and various exploration tools that are used by many Web 2.0 services, from apartment hunting to criminal tracking. Copying my Match profile to my Flickr account was simple.
Let's get more creative. You could take your profile from JDate and copy it into your Plazes account. The idea behind Plazes is to claim ownership of a particular place. It could be your home, a local Kinko's or a Starbucks during a business trip. You can add whatever you want to certain fields of your profile on Plazes, so you paste in your dating profile. Easy enough.
But wait, Plazes can display photos from your Flickr account, and geocode them too. And Plazes displays your location by pulling in GoogleMaps. Now we have a handful of well-defined web services, each providing a layer of functionality that together makes the sum larger than it's parts.
It wouldn't take much to layer on say speedDating events from Eventful on top of your Plazes/Flickr/GoogleMaps mashup, because these services make it simple to aggregate, filter and remix their content. A site like Consumating could do the whole thing in a couple of days, because their foundation is based on open standards, leading-edge web services, tags, and simple extensibility hooks. Instantly they would have features leagues apart from other more established dating sites. The possibilities are mind-blowing when you look at the growing menu of web services at your disposal and an experienced web developer nearby.
Hybrid dating sites can be developed faster, cheaper, scale better and grow more organically than traditional Web 1.0 dating sites. However, reducing Customer Acquisition costs and flawlessly executing a rock-solid marketing plan are as, if not more important than bells and whistles in the long run.
MySpace is the new MTV. New York Times says that music-driven social networking site MySpace is getting more hits than Google, stickier than Friendster and the founders say they are starting a record label.
From 0 to 26 million members in a few years, first to offer blogs, 20-something market, promoting music (something 20-somethings will actually pay for), new offices, new corporate parent (that just might keep their hands off) and increasing ad revenue, partnerships and alignment with major music labels.
I love seeing sites like this pop up out of nowhere. Initially, low risk, high-reward ventures based on a few simple innovations and a basic premise to do it better than it was done before. Most of these sites are not new ideas, but improvements on existing or failed models.
Where is my 30-something version of this thats not based on music and college kids?
A scan of recent business press would indicate that MSM (mainstream media) is interested in hearing not about why revenue is down but more importantly, what a fewsmallstartups are doing to change the face of online dating.
During a recent interview with Red Herring, I was encouraged to talk about companies other than the large date warehouses, and focus more on smaller niche sites that consider innovation their strongest asset. Its liberating to hear from reporters curious to learn how tagging, dynamic profiles, open profiles and identity management can improve the overall health and vitality of the dating industry.
One can only hope this interest continues to develop. More proactive quality PR and marketing from the industry and less press-release hype would be a good start.
Reporters never take dating industry press releases seriously. Think about that when you're hyping your next member milestone or survey results.
There's a new dating site in town, 
Webdate Desktop Application: Actually, it's an Agent. Message, Instant Message, & Search other singles in your area. I'm glad it "Sits snugly in your windows taskbar." 
Safe dating site 
Edward at Other Singles has been using Google Trends to track the popularity of the term "dating" according to geography.
Calculate the "love levels" of the person on the other line with cell cell phone service from Nemesysco Entertainment. Chat someone up and when the conversation is over, the final report will be sent to your cell phone using SMS or audio message. Story at 
